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Kyung-Sook Chung
105-113 (complete pdf)
Evidentiality is a grammatical category that indicates the source of information, for example, whether the speaker has personally seen (or perceived) a situation in question, inferred it from evidence, or heard it from other people. This paper focuses on Korean evidential sentences with the suffix -te, examining them in relation to the assertive speech act. The author shows that a direct evidential sentence with -te expresses two seemingly unrelated meanings -- a meaning that the speaker directly witnessed the event and a meaning regarding the speaker's attitude such as 'psychological distance' and 'lack of responsibility'. It is argued that when the speaker chooses an evidential sentence rather than a non-evidential sentence, (s)he relates his or her association to the information without believing or making a commitment to it. In other words, the speaker of an evidential sentence simply serves as a passive channel through which the proposition is obtained and delivered to the hearer. Thus, a Korean evidential sentence does not express an assertive but rather a presentative speech act (cf. Faller 2002). This analysis suggests that Korean evidentials actually do two things -- they convey an evidential meaning, i.e., the source of information, and they express the non-assertive mode, i.e., a presentative speech act. This raises the question if evidentials in other languages also lack an assertive speech act.
Published in:
Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-415-7 library binding
vii+461 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA